Automated call distribution devices or call centers provide a way to handle large loads of incoming telephone calls for a particular business by routing the calls to the appropriate recorded information or service agent which can handle that particular call. In this business of customer contact technologies, several pieces of technology are widely used to provide customer contact. One such technology is a predictive dialer. This technology automatically places outbound calls, and connects only the human answered call results to agents to handle the calls. Since some of the calls result in non-human answered calls, no connection calls, not in service calls, or other non-responsive events that may be processed by the system without the need for an agent, the systems will place more calls than there are available agents based upon various mathematical formulas to predict the right number of calls to place to keep the agents busy talking while minimizing abandoned calls that can occur when more human answered calls occur than there are available agents. These systems generally place calls that can be connected to any one of a group of agents.
While this method of placing calls that can be handled by any one of a plurality of agents can maximize productivity and minimize abandoned calls, it presents a problem for businesses that desire to have specific calls that are placed connected only to specific agents. This may be desirable in several circumstances, for example, where there is the need to maintain continuity of the personal relationship between the person being called and the specific agent. Other circumstances are in the context of collections calls and customer service. Additionally, many outbound calls placed do not result in successful contact with the desired individual and messages must be left on answering machines or voicemail, or with another person to ask for the person to call back. When these inbound calls are returned at a later time, the desire may be once again to have the caller connected to the specific agent. So there is the need to improve existing customer contact technologies to allow for specific calls, whether they are outbound placed calls, or inbound calls, to be connected to specific agents while maintaining a high level of agent productivity at the same time.